Live by the Sword

by Gus Russo

  On June 26th, Fain, assisted by FBI agent Tom Carter, interviewed Oswald at the FBI’s Fort Worth headquarters. The agency was most interested in determining if Oswald had been recruited by Soviet Intelligence. The tense, two-hour interview was filled with Oswald displays of temper. As usual, Oswald’s answers were replete with lies: he claimed never to have requested Soviet citizenship, or to have offered the Soviets radar information. The interview ended with Oswald’s assurance that he would contact the FBI if the Soviets attempted to contact him. Fain summarized Oswald as “impatient and arrogant during most of the interview,” and sufficiently evasive to warrant a follow-up.

  Two months later, armed with confidential informants’ reports that the Oswalds had nothing to do with the local communist party, Fain reinterviewed Oswald at Oswald’s apartment. As a result of this subsequent interview, Fain recommended that the FBI close its file on Oswald. He had determined that Oswald posed no apparent danger. “You don’t keep a case going if there’s nothing to do, and there was nothing to do,” says Jim Hosty. “He’d defected, become disillusioned, and came back, and Fain was under the impression that he’d seen the light and was going to behave himself.”

  Marina’s file was kept open, but as one of forty such cases, it was not given a high priority. When Fain retired in 1963, Hosty took over his case investigations. “I think it was March 31st [1963] that I went to Forth Worth,” Hosty recalls. “I found out they [the Oswalds] were gone, tracked them to Dallas, and found out that the landlady there had expelled them. She said they were fighting, so she evicted them.” The landlady pointed to another rental house down the street, but when Hosty went there, he found they weren’t home. The purpose of Hosty’s visit to Dallas was simply to size the Oswalds up, to get a feel for them. The approach was friendly. Hosty says that the typical conversation would include letting them know that “we’re here to help them out, blah, blah, blah. It’s not an accusatory interview. . . the British call it ‘vetting.’”

  Had Hosty arrived a few hours later on his initial interview attempt (March 31), he would have stumbled upon an event that would have certainly heightened the Bureau’s interest in Lee Harvey Oswald. (But this, and later attempts to interview Oswald at this address, failed. Soon, Lee Oswald would “skip town.”)

  Odd Photos and Fantasies: The Politics of Lee Harvey Oswald

  In the late afternoon of March 31, 1963, Lee Oswald descended the back stairs of the cheap second-floor apartment on West Neely Street. The 23-year-old former Marine and recent returnee from Russia was of medium height, slender, and ordinarily solemn-looking except when a slight smile—often taken for a smirk—appeared on his face. His head seemed small for his body, prompting a man who would encounter him four months hence in New Orleans—an ardent political enemy who nevertheless came to appreciate Oswald’s quick intelligence—to think that he had “the face of a parrot on the neck of a bull.”2 But anyone who happened to see him walking down the back stairs of the tired house that afternoon would not have looked first at his face. Oswald was carrying an old bolt-action rifle he had just bought by mail. It was the rifle from which all the shots would be fired in Dealey Plaza almost eight months later. It was the weapon that would kill John Kennedy.3

  From the back stairs of 214 West Neely Street, Oswald entered the building’s postage stamp-sized backyard. He was dressed entirely in black, with a revolver, also bought by mail, strapped in a holster on his hip. The smirk for which he would soon become known—and which would infuriate police officers and journalists after his capture on November 22nd—played about his lips. Marina, the wife he had married in the Soviet Union, was hanging up diapers for their baby daughter. When he came into view, she burst out laughing and asked what on earth he was doing in his costume. He told her to take a picture of him and handed her a camera. “Are you crazy? I’ve never taken a picture in my life.” Lee Oswald persisted. The afternoon sun was sinking and he was concerned about the shadows that would appear in the photograph. Marina resisted. “I’m busy and I don’t know how. Take it yourself. . . What a weird one you are! Who on earth needs a photograph like that?”4 Already disturbed by Lee’s recent acquisition of the guns, Marina later said she thought Lee had “gone crazy.”5

  But she soon did his bidding, snapping the shutter repeatedly, and taking the photograph that would become his representation throughout the world. Before they went back up to their modest apartment, she asked him why he wanted his picture taken with guns, of all stupid things. Oswald answered that he was going to send it to The Militant, to show he was “ready for anything.”6 The Militant was one of two newspapers with which he had posed, holding them in one hand while grasping his rifle with the other. The second newspaper was The Worker, published by the American Communist Party. Oswald may not have known that the two supposedly fraternal papers were in fact at ideological war with each other, partly over Soviet dominance of socialist movements and interpretations of Stalin’s role in history. Pressed to choose between the two, he probably would have chosen The Militant Under a heading of “News and Views from Dallas”—where the newspaper’s readers were very thin on the ground—the March 11th issue with which he posed contained a letter from an “L. H.” of Dallas praising it as “the most informative radical publication in America.”7

  Most importantly by the fall of 1963, The Militant was reporting to its subscribers Castro’s belief that the United States, in contrast to its publicized desire to reduce world tensions, was in fact “increasing its efforts to tighten the noose around Cuba.” Oswald’s other Communist group contact, The Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), had been reporting to its members since the fall of 1961 that the Kennedys were planning a reinvasion of Cuba, using troops being trained in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and E1 Salvador.8 Oswald agreed with Castro’s (and the FPCC’s) analysis, telling a Dallas friend, Michael Paine, “You could tell what they [the Kennedys] wanted to do by reading between the lines, reading the thing and doing a little reading between the lines.” In fact, both Oswald and Castro were correct, though few in the United States knew it in 1963.9

  After Oswald’s death, some would insist that the photo-taking incident never occurred—that the photos were fakes, designed to implicate the innocent “patsy.” From interviews and the HSCA work described later,10 we now know that the photos are genuine, and that Oswald took pride in them.

  On his return to America, Oswald applied to work for Peter Gregory, a Russian translator. This move opened Lee and Marina to the White Russian communities of Fort Worth and Dallas, and would introduce the Oswalds to their few friends in Texas. Names like George DeMohrenschildt, Michael and Ruth Paine, and Volkmar Schmidt became part of Lee and Marina’s small world. It was at dinner parties with this community that the Oswalds found both assistance and an arena for political discourse.

  One of the people who managed to befriend Lee on his return from Russia to the States was Ruth Paine, a Russian language student. Her husband, from whom she would be amicably separated for most of the eight months from now until the assassination, was a research engineer at Bell Helicopter. Michael Paine remembered Oswald well. His father had been active in leftist politics, and, with that in mind, Paine expressed his dislike for Lee’s treatment of Marina. “One of the goals of communism is to stop the exploitation of man by man, and here was this guy treating his wife like a vassal. I was quite offended by that.” He also took note of Oswald’s conviction that capitalism could not be reformed or improved, and thus “had to be destroyed.”

  But even before he had time to appraise Lee’s politics or relationship with Marina, Paine was startled by something the strange young man showed him at their first meeting, just after they introduced themselves:

  Almost the next thing he does is to pick up this eight-by-ten glossy photo of himself in black with a rifle and a couple of pamphlets [the two newspapers]. . . I didn’t know what to make of it because it was very different from what I had expected to find. I had known communists, and they were m
ostly intellectually interesting people. . . I’d been told he was a communist and I kind of expected a social idealist and couldn’t see the connection between [that and] this picture of a guy with his rifle there in black clothing. It was so different, I just didn’t put the two together. But he was obviously proud of that picture and. . . the first thing we did then was to talk about his times in Russia. His greatest disagreement—bitterness—toward Russia seemed to be that they wouldn’t let him own a rifle unless he was a member of a paramilitary organization there.11

  Coincidentally, at the time he met the Paines, Oswald was working at the graphic arts shop Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall, where he had access to the necessary equipment for processing the photos. His co-worker Dovid (Dennis) Ofstein recalls, somewhat haltingly:

  About a month or two after Lee came to work for us, he asked me what the company policy was about using the company equipment for making personal photographs, enlargements of personal pictures, family pictures, that sort of thing. I told him at the time that the company policy was pretty much that you don’t do it, but that people did it anyway, and as long as it didn’t get out of hand, the company usually didn’t say very much about it.12

  It is now clear that Oswald sent these photographs precisely where he told Marina he would.13 The Militant, published by the Socialist Workers’ Party, was one of the few American periodicals where one could read “alternative” (pro-Castro) news and opinion. Oswald’s reason for subscribing to it meshed with the passion for revolutionary Cuba he would express to Volkmar Schmidt and others during the corning months. Almost certainly, he sent the paper a print of one of the backyard photos to ingratiate himself with the publisher while giving notice of himself as important and resolute—and potentially as a useful Party agent in Dallas. Michael Paine thought the print Oswald showed him “represented an icon of just the way he’d like to be seen, the world to think of him, the way he thought of himself.”14 The way he thought of himself was as a soldier of revolution whose perspicacity and deeds would win him recognition and praise, perhaps make him a commander someday.

  In fact, the photograph had the opposite effect when it arrived at The Militant’s offices in New York. Sylvia Weinstein, who handled the paper’s subscriptions, opened the envelope and thought the man in black was “kookie.” In her opinion, he had chosen a “stupid” way to declare his loyalty to the publication. (Weinstein was struck by the apparent ignorance of the man who held The Militant and The Worker together in his hand. Anyone holding both, together with a gun, she said, would have to be assumed to be “really dumb and totally naive.”)

  Farrell Dobbs, National Secretary of the Socialist Workers’ Party, was appalled and frightened. After suffering a witch hunt and being imprisoned during the McCarthy years, Dobbs feared something much more serious than “some weirdo” acting out his fantasies. Specifically, he feared a provocateur, and instructed Weinstein to immediately bring to his office any similar material if more arrived.15

  “He was extremely critical of President Kennedy, and he was just obsessed with what America did to support this invasion at the Bay of Pigs, obsessed with his anger towards Kennedy.”

  —Volkmar Schmidt, describing a conversation he had with Oswald soon after his return from Russia16

  The rifle that would fire the bullets in Dealey Plaza was a hoary veteran of World War II. It arrived at a post office box assigned to “A. J. Hidell,” the name under which Oswald had bought the rifle and a revolver.17 Just days before placing his order, the rifle’s new owner—a low-paid worker with few employable skills, dim prospects, but a powerful desire to become a political luminary—had a rare long talk at a dinner party with another guest named Volkmar Schmidt, a discussion which might explain Oswald’s desire to purchase the weapons. A geologist by profession, Schmidt did research for Mobil Oil. His intelligence and psychological insights were admired in his upper middle class circle of worldly Dallasites.

  The German-born scientist had no way of knowing that Oswald and his pregnant, Russian-born wife, who was also at the party with their 13-month-old child, were descending toward a relationship of severe strain, sometimes relieved by moments of groping for each other, but increasingly battered by insult and abuse. But Schmidt did notice that Oswald seemed emotionally detached from his “lovely” wife and baby daughter. More than that, he felt certain that Oswald was “in deep, deep spiritual and emotional trouble. . . a lost soul.” The older man sensed an almost palpable emptiness and despair in the younger one, “a state of mind that Dostoyevsky described as a suicide.” Schmidt added:

  I realized that Lee Harvey Oswald was a deeply troubled man who was spiritually totally empty. . . He was totally obsessed with his own political agenda. . .[He] would have found anybody of importance to assassinate—to become history, to leave a mark in the history books, no matter what.18

  Schmidt was most worried by Oswald’s seeming determination to give meaning to his life by achieving something political—for which he had no means. Even if his basic motives were good, as Schmidt perceived them, the youth had an abnormal gap between his yearning and his possibilities. Remembering that similar traits had driven fellow Germans to join the Bader Meinhoff gang, the thoughtful geologist considered him “exceedingly dangerous.” Oswald’s inner tensions might lead him to explode—not, Schmidt then imagined, into political assassination but perhaps domestic violence or something at that level.

  The two discussed the Soviet Union, from which Oswald had returned some nine months before the dinner party. Oswald’s comments were far more interesting and seemingly intellectual than his meager formal education would seemingly allow, and were uttered in a thin, controlled voice, with the wisp of a southern accent. Schmidt thought he discerned the reason for at least some of Oswald’s desperation: the young man had put a great deal of effort into learning Russian and going to the Soviet Union, but failed to find what he was seeking there. “Now his hopes were dashed; now what?” Back in America with his wife and little child, he was poor, struggling, anxious to assert himself—but empty. “He could not find anything positive to fill that void in his life.”

  Sitting near a window, the new acquaintances talked throughout most of the party (at least two hours). The conversation turned to domestic politics, and Schmidt could hardly help noticing that his new acquaintance was “extremely critical” of President Kennedy, chiefly because of the American-backed invasion at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs in April 1961, a mere three months after Kennedy entered the White House. Oswald disparaged Soviet socialism but felt very differently about Cuba’s.

  On his return from Russia nine months earlier, Oswald had envisioned himself a luminary. A Russian immigrant who briefly defended him would remember that “he wanted to stand out. He wanted everybody to know he was the defector.”19 After great disappointment that a swarm of reporters hadn’t greeted him when he disembarked from his ship in New York, the would-be celebrity studiously composed a list of questions for himself, then answered them. Was he a communist? he asked himself in question 7A. “Yes, basically, although I hate the USSR and [its] socialist system, I still think Marxism can work under different circumstances.”20 To anyone who listened, he would say, in one form or another, that the Soviet system was as bad as the American one, and in some of the same fundamental ways. But he retained his belief—as someone with his powerful longings had to retain it—that something better surely existed on this earth than the social systems under which he had, until now, been so deeply disappointed, deprived, and hurt. His new hope was Cuba.

  In fact, Oswald appeared to have shifted his faith in and aspiration for Soviet socialism to the newer, seemingly purer and happier Cuban variety. In this, he resembled many believers in Marxism-Leninism of the time. Accepting the idea that the bureaucratic, repressive Soviet regime had deeply corrupted socialism’s ideals—a corruption Oswald knew from his 30-odd months of disillusioning personal witness in the country—a large percentage of the thin ranks of American “sympathizers” were
now convinced that Fidel Castro’s socialistic version, which they pictured as enlightened, progressive, and fun-loving, had come to carry the banner of mankind’s hope for the better life promised by freedom from capitalism.

  Oswald’s attachment to Castro was more than blind faith and shattered hopes on the rebound from his Soviet experience. Since Fidel, as his admirers happily called him, had begun capturing headlines in 1958 with daring guerrilla activities in Cuba’s vast Sierra Maestra mountains, the intellectual campesino embodied a great romantic appeal for people of even moderately leftist feelings. The dashing rebel went on to overthrow a corrupt dictatorship that had pandered to American business interests, including the interests of Mafia bosses. He spoke a language of clarity and understandable human feelings, as opposed to the stupefying mumbo-jumbo of ritualistic dishonesty from Moscow. He seemed a genuine idealist—a visionary whose promises of hospitals, schools, and self-fulfillment for the masses sounded thrillingly attainable in his long, passionate speeches. This was the revolutionary figure of the age, and young Oswald quickly responded to him.

  Oswald had had Cuba on his mind for a long time. His 30-odd months of residence in the Soviet Union gave him substantial knowledge of ordinary Soviet life, even with privileges that put him far above the average in living conditions and pay. For him, this was more than ample opportunity to become disenchanted with Soviet socialism. And if, as now seems clear, Marxism as a vehicle for protest and longing was the political constant in his life since discovering it at the age of 15, it is understandable that he transferred his full passion—or obsession, or contorted desire—to the brave new world he envisioned being constructed under the humane new leadership in Havana. His affection for Castro would become so strong that he would want to name his new baby “Fidel,” a decision from which he retreated only because Marina insisted there would be no Fidel in their family.21